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Sunday, September 18, 2011

Who "Won" The American Civil War?

This piece in The American Interest asks a very interesting question - who "really" won the Civil War?

Whatever else the Civil War failed to accomplish, and whatever questions it left unanswered, we can at least be reasonably certain about the answers to two questions: What America would we live in, and what world would others live in, if the American republic had fragmented into two or more pieces after April 1861? Or if the institution of slavery had survived, either in an independent Southern Confederacy or as the foundation of the new Western states whose future had been Abraham Lincoln’s greatest concern?

Everyone knows about the Gettysburg, Lincoln, the end of slavery, Reconstruction, and the Western expansion. However, you don't usually hear about the post-War rise of corporations and fluctuating commodities markets, which were just as vital to the development of this country.